A Man

Through twisty streets and between the high-gabled houses of quaint old Weimar, 74 national flags flapped last week on short staffs sprouting from the mudguards of statesmen's limousines. The nations of the world were doing homage in this small Thuringian city. Here in 1919 the Constitution of the present German Republic was adopted. And in Weimar 100 years ago last week died Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Not only a poet, this lusty, lyric German philosopher was also a resourceful statesman, ever at the elbow of Weimar's reigning Grand Duke.

Today Thuringia is one of the federated German republics. Nonetheless, Her Royal Highness the widowed Grand Duchess Feodora of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach is still very much alive. Last week the Premier of Thuringia yielded gallantly to the regal Duchess who is 41. She sailed sedately into the Grand Ducal Mausoleum (where Poet Goethe lies buried near her husband) on the arm of no less a personage than the Chancellor of all Germany, pale, ascetic, thin-lipped Dr. Heinrich Bruning, 47. As Democracy thus squired Autocracy to the tomb of Genius, a witness was Comrade Anatoly Lunacharsky representing the Soviet Power. All over Russia on this day last week Soviet celebrations honored Goethe. Communism celebrated not because it approves Goethe's bourgeois works or his grand ducal associations, but because the Russian Government tries to keep on friendliest terms with the German Government and wanted to make amends for a recent attack in Moscow by a crazed Russian on Dr. Fritz von Twardowski, Councilor of the German Embassy.

In Weimar the most striking floral tribute, everyone agreed last week, was an enormous sheaf of real Greek olive branches laid on Goethe's tomb by the representative of Greece. Ordinary flowers were bestowed in the name of India, Haiti, South Africa, Finland and 70 more nations. The U. S. wreath--not laid by Ambassador Sackett. who was in Paris-was deposited by a grave personage whose dry wit is concealed on public occasions by his Buddha-like mien. Councilor John Wiley, chief prop of Ambassador Willys in Poland. Read the wreath which Mr. Wiley deposited at the foot of Goethe's sarcophagus: The United States of America in commemoration.

Author Thomas Mann, famed German novelist and Nobel Prizeman, orated in Weimar on Goethe last week, though not in such towering terms as were used by President Julius Peterson of the Goethe Society in a broadcast heard with delight by all Germany. "Goethe was the greatest poet of all time!" declared President Peterson. "He was the forerunner of Charles Darwin in evolution theory; he was the forerunner of General Goethals in foreseeing the construction of the Panama Canal; and he was the forerunner of Prince von Bismarck in visualizing the creation of a united Germany!"

Goethe as a scientist was crisply eulogized in Weimar by Physicist Max Planck, author of the famed Quantum Theory. Clap, clap went the hands not only of all the foreign diplomats but also of all the rectors of all the German universities, of all the premiers of all the German states except Prussia, of Professors Schreiber of Yale, Woodbridge of Columbia and the Rector of the Academy of Paris at the Sorbonne, Professor Sebastien Charlety.

At the hour of Goethe's death, 11:25 a. m., every belfry in all Germany sent forth last week a solemn tolling. Lumps rose in millions of German throats. Gasped President Peterson of the Goethe Society, fighting to master his emotions, "Goethe was ours!"

Goethe. Only ultra-squeamish Goethe admirers belittle the major fact that from early youth to ripe old age Goethe drew what he called his inspiration from a series of women, very few of whom were intellectual and only one of whom he married (17 years after their child was born). Eleven of Goethe's women are named by the Encyclopedia Britannica which emphasizes that he had many another. Last week, addressing young U. S. females at Barnard College, Professor Wilhelm Braun cried: "The charm of Goethe's matchless personality is explained not by the universality of his genius but by the splendid normality of his life. He has given us a pattern that will always be valid: that it is the highest duty and aim of the individual to develop his own individuality and character to the highest extent possible." Clap, clap went the hands of President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University and other wholehearted Goethians.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born at Frankfort-On-Main in 1749, the son of a rich lawyer and the grandson of a tailor turned innkeeper. Educated in the arts, sciences and law, Goethe's poetical and practical career took imposing form in 1775, when, aged 26, he settled down in Weimar to spend the rest of his life at the court of his friend, Grand Duke Karl August. From then on as poet, statesman and a genius of widest interests 'Goethe permitted his personality to expand majestically. He crowned his career by writing Faust, a poem into which he poured a lifetime of erudition, inspiration and philosophy. If the German people have a "national poem" it is Faust.* The Emperor Napoleon, to whom Genius Goethe was presented at the zeniths of their careers, engaged him in profound conversation for some time, then implanted the seal of French approval by exclaiming, "Voila un homme--There's a man!"

*Spirited is the English translation of Faust just made by Princeton's Professor George Madison Priest and published last week (Covici Friede, $5). The turning of the tide of battle between fire-puffing devils and valiant angels who attack them by scattering roses, Professor Priest translates thus:

MEPHISTOPHELES TO THE SATANS:

They think perhaps that with such flowery matter

They'll snow hot devils in and make them cool. Your breath will melt and shrivel it.--Now puff, you puffers! . . .

As the barrage of roses continues, Mephistopheles, surveying the rout of his Satans, exclaims:

Oh, curses, shame on such an idiot band!

Upon their heads the Satans stand.

Head over heels fat ones are curving,

Plunging in Hell ass-uppermost. . . .

CHORUS OF ANGELS:

Only the loving

Love leads to Light

"Lines in the translation which may seem to be improperly stumbling and irregular," writes Translator Priest, "are in many cases reflections of the same characteristics in the German, a device of Goethe's to vary the metre or to suggest the momentary restlessness or confusion of spirit of the speaker."

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